TT: Ghostly Encounters

Today’s post is about ghost sightings. There are people who swear they see, or ‘feel’ spirits, and have no doubts at all that there really are such things as ghosts. What does it take for a person’s spirit to stay behind after his body has gone? Is it unfinished business? Is it an accident? Is it a choice?

I’ll start by telling one of my own true ‘ghost’ stories:

When I was a child, maybe nine years old, I remember waking up and seeing a little old man lying on his side in the bed, hand propping up his face, maybe waiting for me to wake up. It seemed the most normal, natural thing in the world that this odd little man was there, and we talked. I can’t remember anything we talked about, and I don’t know if I ever did remember. I just remember the feeling. He was there, we talked, and I was not afraid.

For some reason, my mom and my sister-in-law opened my door and walked into the room; I think they heard me talking. They asked me what I was doing, who I was talking to, and I pointed to him and said that I was talking to the little man. My mom, of course, said there was no man there, and he just went away. I’ve never, that I know of, seen him again. But even though that was so long ago, I remember that so clearly. He was there. I was awake. I was talking to him.

Whenever I recall that encounter, I see him in my mind as a gnome-like fellow, very short. I seem to remember a hat, but I’m not sure that’s a true memory.

What I wouldn’t give to remember what we talked about!

*

RF Long sent me her own encounters, and gave me permission to share what she wrote:

“Seeing” a ghost is not always a case of actually seeing, but of knowing… knowing someone is there, even if it goes against the evidence of your own eyes. Ghosts aren’t part of my daily life. Its something that happens quite infrequently, but enough to convince me, personally, that there is something out there.

I know that as a child I “saw” more than I do now. I remember being on holidays in Brittany in France (a place I still have a great love of and a strong connection to). I was probably no more than five years old and we were staying in a campsite situated around a château near Dol-de-Bretagne. I still have a very clear memory of standing in a cobbled courtyard between the house and the stables, and looking up at the second floor of the house. A woman was looking out of the window. A very sad, blonde haired woman. She didn’t move or speak (I probably wouldn’t have heard her if she did). But I knew by the way the window box contrasted her appearance that, in five-year-old-speak that they lady I could see there wasn’t there. I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t even that impressed. I think I mentioned it to my family a few days later over dinner in a totally matter of fact way.

I’ve also had a couple of incidents with my son as well. When he was about three, and my husband was away on a work trip, he appeared downstairs a few hours after bedtime to tell me there was a man in his room. I went up with him but couldn’t see anything. He was adamant. A man was standing beside the window. We approached the window, my son cuddling into me, and I persuaded him to reach out and touch the curtain where “the man” was standing. He did it, blinked and said “Oh, that’s okay then.” And promptly went back to bed and to sleep without a care in the world. I went downstairs and jumped at every noise for the rest of the night.

After my father in law died, my husband became vice-captain of the fishing club to which he and his father had belonged. On the morning after the first competition, my son asked my husband if he was “steady”. Not a turn of phrase either of us would use, so we asked him why he wanted to know and he told us “My papa in heaven was in my dream last night. He said I was too little to go fishing with you yet because when you’re in a boat, you have to be steady.” It was exactly the type of thing my father in law would have said. The boys have since gone out fishing together and caught more fish in a single hour than my husband had caught in the whole season with the club. He said, our son just dropped his line down and the next thing pulled up two mackerel. There were few things my father in law liked so much as fishing. Being with his family was one of them and we all feel very strongly that he’s still there, watching over us.

Not all my experiences have been pleasant. On a French-exchange trip, when I was a teenager, friends were planning to have a seance in a haunted room of the house where we were all staying for the weekend. As they discussed it, I felt something outside the window, something malevolent that wanted in. At some point I fainted. I came too, unhurt, and a bit bewildered, to see a group of very frightened teenagers who had changed their minds completely. Apparently I told them not to do it, although I don’t remember saying a word.

Certain places carry memories, or perhaps feelings that echo down through the years. My husband tells the story of his first trip to Pompei in late November with a friend. There were very few other visitors that day and he said there was a very clear feeling to the place – not malevolent, but a distinct sensation that he had no place there, that it was not of his time and he did not belong. Similarly, Iliz Koz, also in Brittany, elicited a similar response in me. It’s a sad place, as if the stones still remember what happened and the people who used to live there before the sands came and swallowed the village. Small wonder that the sites of so many tragedies are reputed to be haunted. Maybe its not spirits, but rather the places themselves.

For some reasons ghosts and libraries tend to be drawn together. I think it has a lot to do with love of books. Some owners, or custodians, don’t seem willing to leave them be looked after by anyone else. In a previous job, one of our storerooms was in a constant state of disarray. Problem was, if it was tidied up during the day, the following morning we would find everything scattered around once again. Many the staff member tried and failed. In the end, we left it alone.

The library where I now work has many old books with a fairly turbulent history attached. It belongs to a religious order of friars. The priests and brothers who collected many of the rare books were avid bibliophiles. In general the friary is reputed to be haunted. The housekeeper has a number of tales – my favourite being the priest spotted through a window still tending his beloved garden, a year after his death. And the library… well, I’m certain that caring eyes are still keeping a watch over the books, and sometimes, in the evenings as I’m closing up, I might catch a glimpse of a brown robe down the aisles.

*

From Qwillia Rain:

I don’t have very many stories of ghostly encounters other than the time I was in my friend’s house and one kept pulling on my hair and messing with the lights. She’d warned me ahead of time about it, so I was kind of prepared.

They don’t freak me out overly much, only when they’re malevolent do I not like them.

There was also the time my dad got really pissed at me and woke me up out of a dead sleep by yelling at me–at the time he’d been dead about three months and I moved to another state two months after he died, so…Others might say I have an overactive imagination, and maybe I do–I wouldn’t be a good writer if I didn’t, right?–but I’ve always believed in the spirit world.

*

And from Pamela L:

My husband’s first ex-wife had recently passed away in her home in Louisville’s West End. We were to meet his son there and arrived in the evening after work. Steven was already waiting by the front gate. We stood outside and chatted for a few minutes. James, my husband, was in front of our car, an Oldsmobile Calais,  talking with his son, our daughter was standing alongside the driver’s door, and I was behind the vehicle.

Suddenly something invisible shoved into me, as if trying to push me away. Whatever or whoever it was, I don’t know because there was nothing there. No one was near me, not even Steven’s dog. The only guess I could make is it was Stella’s ghost, angry at my presence, who wanted me to leave. The other explanation was it could have been a ghost from the run-down tiny cemetery across the street, but to this day, I doubt that.

*

The following was sent to me by Diana Coyle, and she talks about her sensitivity to and experiences with spirits.

Hi Jane,

I am thrilled to be able to supply you with a few instances where I was lucky enough to be part of ghost encounters or other paranormal phenomena.

I started to become aware of my “abilities” to see ghosts and have visions of future events through my dreams when I was probably around twelve or thirteen years old.  My Grandmother and Mom both have select sixth sense capabilities, so I was lucky enough to have inherited it from them.  My abilities go way beyond both of theirs, though.

I would have full fledged dreams of certain circumstances that were going to happen.  The circumstances could be something good as someone becoming pregnant and they didn’t know it, to the prediction of death happening to people close to me. I wouldn’t be supplied a date in which the occurrence was actually going to happen, but I just knew it was going to happen some time soon.  I never thought it was something strange and honestly, thought it was something that every teenager experienced.  I learned quickly though, that on the contrary, not everyone has these kinds of abilities or gifts when I finally became ridiculed and called, “weird” by my friends.  I just ignored the comments and never shut the door to the communication I was receiving.

There have been numerous situations in which I have either seen a ghost, had a predicting dream or even received an answer to a question I posed out loud to a deceased love one.  A few people close to me have witnessed my experiences and are usually trying to find a “sane” explanation for what they have witnessed with me, but I just laugh at them and take it for what it is.

Years ago, when I was living in Staten Island, NY, I came home one day from high school.  My father was working and my mother wasn’t home from food shopping yet.  I walked to my bedroom to change out of my school uniform and out of the corner of my eye I saw a large, black figure standing in my parents’ bedroom looking down at their bed.  I stopped and walked to the doorway to have a closer look and the figure in black looked up at me with a serious look upon his face.  He was dressed in garb that was from many years ago and ironically, the best way I could explain it would be a long, black coat tailed jacket, over black pants and black shoes.  After he looked at me, he turned and just disappeared.  I didn’t say anything to my mom when she came home because I was seriously second guessing that I really saw someone at all.  Years later, my mother and I were having a conversation about paranormal things and I finally admitted what I saw that day to her.  She stopped dead in her tracks and turned to look at me with this shocked expression on her face.  I was preparing for a comment of disbelief from her, but was shocked when she asked me to describe what I had seen that day.  When I described the man in detail to her she replied, “So, you have seen him too?  I didn’t want to say anything to you before this in fear that I was going to scare you.  I saw the same exact figure one day as I was vacuuming my bedroom.  He was standing in the doorway watching what I was doing, but I never felt that I was in any sort of danger.”  We never did find out who the man was.

In the same house, both my mom and myself saw the apparition of one of our beloved Great Dane dogs, Brutus.  He was a gorgeous dog, straight from the lineage of show parents.  We loved him dearly and missed him drastically when he finally passed away of old age in his sleep at the age of 10 or 11.  Numerous times when my mom or myself were alone in the house, we would see his apparition walking from my bedroom into the living room.  We would even hear his bark occasionally and a smile would spread across our face that we heard him again from wherever he was.

My most blessed ability came to me after my father suddenly passed away at the young age of 47.  My mother and I were devastated beyond belief over his sudden death.  I kept talking to him asking how everything happened the way it did.  I never thought I would be ever able to “communicate” with a deceased person until the day when I actually heard my father’s voice answer something I had asked him out loud.  I was in disbelief over it, but kept my mind open in hopes that I would be able to have him talk with me for as long as he was granted permission.  I would be able to call upon him to talk to me after I would begin to either talk out loud or speak silently in my mind to him.  I would receive a vision of him and then he would begin talking to me and supply the answers I needed at the moment.  I stayed quiet about this for sometime until I felt that maybe it would help my mother through the grief she was experiencing.  She didn’t know what to make of it at first because no one in our family ever showed this ability before.  So, she put me to the test.  I asked her to ask my father a question to something I would never know the answer to.  She asked him a question regarding something that was said when they first started dating.  I asked my father to help me out and he supplied an answer to me that made no sense at all.  I relayed the answer back to my mother and she burst out crying.  I didn’t know if it was a right or wrong answer at first.  When I asked her if I was right, she answered, “That was the exact answer I was looking for.”

I had my communication opened up for quite some time like that with my father.  Then one day it stopped in that fashion, but still continued in other ways.  I would still ask questions of him and call upon him to find a way to answer me back.  Usually I would ask him to show me the answer in the form of either yes or no answers or have the answer “fall in my lap” one way or another.  When he would answer yes or no questions, I would always pose it around the flickering of a light because he was an Electrician by trade, (one flicker for yes, two for no type of response).  I felt that would be a unique form of communicating with me.  When I needed him to answer me in my most troubling times, he would flick the light as many times as needed to give me his reply.

I also have the ability to think of someone out of the blue and ironically, they will call me that very same day.  They would consume my thoughts and I would just know that I was getting a phone call from them very soon.  Also, if someone is troubled by something and are going though a down time in their life, unexplainably I will receive a vision in my mind of them.  This wouldn’t just be of someone I was in daily contact with either.  It would be with people that I fell out of touch with for years.  Then I would know that I had to make it my business to try and contact them again.  When I did, each and every single time they were in a really down time in their lives and needed a friend to talk to.

I have even been able to start singing a song that I haven’t heard in years and the next time I turned the radio on that day, that very song would be playing on the radio.

I sometimes get gut feelings that a phone will ring before it actually does.  I have walked to pick it up even though it isn’t ringing just yet and while in my hand, it starts ringing.  My husband usually gets a bit freaked when I do this.

Well, I just want to say thank you for including me in this paranormal discussion, Jane.  I had so much fun sharing with you and your readers.

~Diana Coyle
Book Reviewer, Night Owl Romance

*

My thanks to all the people who sent me their stories and made today’s post so interesting!

So what about you? Do you believe in ghosts? Have you seen one, felt one, heard one?

Or do you think spirits are just figments of some imaginations, and there really is nothing ‘out there’?

~Jane

Tags: Ghosts, Spirits